Fallon faces the camera

He looked nervous, even flustered, at first, and some of the prepared comedy was surprisingly lame. That doesn't matter. Jimmy Fallon's first few days don't really reveal how Late Night With Jimmy Fallon will fare.

Monitoring the opening kinks and experiments of a new talk show is a spectator sport, and this entry comes with an added American Idol edge: NBC had the last word during the auditions, but Internet users are now expected to comment and cavil interactively and build - or diminish - Fallon's television audience.

Fallon was cute and funny on Saturday Night Live, but he is not necessarily the ideal choice for the Late Night core audience of young males: His humor is mischievous, not anarchic. (If fans had been granted a call-in vote, they might have elected Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert.)

Still, Fallon is engaging and has an antic, quick-witted charm. He seemed more confident by the show's third night and, oddly enough, had better comic chemistry with Cameron Diaz on Wednesday than with Tina Fey, his former "Weekend Update" co-anchor on SNL, the night before. Most of his skits and routines, however, seemed written for the Web, not for broadcast.

It's still too soon to pass judgment on Fallon's talents as a talk-show host, but it's a perfectly good time to examine NBC's latest test of synergy, the marriage of the Internet and a television show.

Almost all shows nowadays have Web sites with extraneous videos, fan blogs and viewer e-mail exchanges. But Fallon has gone further to co-opt the Internet than either of his two network rivals, Jimmy Kimmel on ABC and Craig Ferguson on CBS, or even cable upstarts like Chelsea Handler, the host of Chelsea Lately on E!. In the months leading up to his debut on Monday, Fallon tried to pump up younger viewers' interest with Late Night Webisodes. He has pages on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

Perhaps accordingly, many of the routines he worked into the show in its first nights might have been better suited to YouTube. And that youth-oriented material clashes with the highly conventional, even fusty jokes in his opening monologue ("Everybody's cutting back, everybody: Madonna's now down to one teenage boyfriend"), as well as with the choice of a veteran actor, Robert De Niro, to be his first guest.

Twitter is so overexposed that it has become a joke, but Fallon apparently isn't in on it. He interviewed Diaz by posing questions submitted via Twitter. Those turned out to be as dull and anodyne as any taken from a live audience. ("If Cameron wasn't acting, what would her dream job be?" Diaz didn't have a ready answer, so Fallon supplied it: "Forest ranger.")

Wednesday's quite funny parody of romance novels, "bromance novels," came with a link on the show's Web site (latenightwithjimmyfallon.com) that allows users to watch a video of the shooting of the cover art.

Fallon consistently tried to incorporate a wackier Web spirit into his on-air performance, even picking random people in the studio audience and assigning them made-up Facebook identities. None were very funny.

Remarkably, given how many months he has had to prepare, many of his supposedly wacky, Web-style pranks were oddly plodding and unimaginative. On the first night three audience members were invited onstage to lick something in exchange for $10. The things were all inanimate objects: a lawn mower, a copier, a fishbowl. The slow-motion "super-sexy replay" was funny once, not three times.

Fallon does not have a sidekick, but he does have a cool band, the Roots, whose musicians are deadpan and steadfastly underwhelmed by his jokes, and over time that could serve as a comic foil to his eager-to-please persona.

There were other amusing moments, including a random, bizarre video of German soccer players dancing that was found on the Web and a mock charitable appeal for laid-off Wall Street workers, a Save the Bankers Foundation, that could have just as easily been a Saturday Night Live skit.

And Fallon got better, and more relaxed, after his debut, though he joked with Tina Fey about his "flop sweat" moment with De Niro. (When performers admit to being nervous, it's a little like a woman on a date bemoaning how fat she is: Nobody wants to hear it.)

The first days are tough because large audiences tune in to see what all the pre-premiere fuss was about, boosting ratings and expectations, then quickly turn away if not instantly amused. And most hosts go through a trial-and-error period. Kimmel started out more loutishly and live; now he is more buttoned-down, and his show is taped, even though it is still called Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Ferguson began with a very conventional Tonight Show format, then slowly allowed more of his own offbeat storytelling and Monty Python-esque eccentricities into his act.

NBC picked Fallon, and he can sometimes seem like an old person's notion of a hip young comic, but that doesn't mean that he isn't funny or that he cannot hold his own on Late Night. Only time, not Twitter, will tell.